Tokyo ~ San Francisco

09/17/2013

ママの自慢

As a 2nd grader, Tesla's homework is getting more interesting. Her teacher, Arunan-sensei, asks kids to write a journal each week. English or Japanese, misspellings fine, 1 or 2 sentences fine. Just write...to him. And he replies. It's 交換日記, a tradition I experienced in Japan where kids write journals to their teachers and get personalized notes back. The point, as Arunan explained, is to get the kids to express themselves since in 1st grade, it was learning how to spell something as an assignment vs. communicating whatever the kid wants, to a real person.

Tesla does English for the most part at her After School Program. Today I encouraged her to do it in Japanese. She decided what to say in English, and with a tad of help from me, Tesla pieced together the words into a sentence in Japanese. That in itself surprised me at how she could actually say a full sentence because she's rather reticent in speaking 日本語 to me. And totally on her own, then wrote this, even using the correct particle を instead of お!

Even seeing your kid magically learn to read and write in English is pretty amazing. Schools work! But to see the effectiveness of her Japanese program makes me so proud. Day in, day out, her Japanese senseis' efforts are sticking! And her friends and whole community around her (After School is in Japantown and lots of Rosa Parks kids go there), are making this experience normal for her so I won't get the "I don't wanna do Japanese."

So yeah this is a 自慢 post in a good way! I'm very proud and grateful of the work done at Rosa Parks!!